Tuesday, April 26, 2016

This paper sets out to prove that the privatization of higher education is creating a system of inequality that works to widen the gap between the income classes of college students by negatively affecting lower class students mentally, physically, and financially. Through my research, I found evidence of all of the above. There have been relationships found between student debt and financial stress, financial stress and mental health, and student mental health and student physical health. The evidence found goes to support the fact that students that need student loans (mostly lower class students) are being pushed down by the individual problem that stress has become, This essay promotes addressing the larger social problems that are causing this financial stress in lower class students.

Becker, Dana. One Nation under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea. New York: Oxford

UP, 2013. Print.

Summary

This book details the concept of stress as an idea. Stress has become an individual issue: it has become a problem that individuals must work to solve themselves. Becker's book pushes readers to view stress as a product of larger social problems, and should be addressed in a larger scale. The author speaks to many aspects of society that enforce this privatized stress and the social problems that are behind it.

Author

"Dana Becker, PhD, is a professor of social work at Bryn Mawr College and author of One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea. Her previous books include Through the Looking Glass: Women and Borderline Personality Disorder and The Myth of Empowerment: Women and the Therapeutic Culture in America." -Time.com

Key Term

stressism- the concept that states that regular stress from life is an individual problem, rather than a larger social problem

Quotes

“the current belief that the tensions of contemporary life are primarily individual lifestyle problems to be solved through managing stress, as opposed to the belief that these tensions are linked to social forces and need to be resolved primarily through social and political means” (Becker, 24).

"the idea of equality as identical treatment for everyone depends on a sameness of social condition and a sameness of opportunity that simply don't exist" (Becker, 747).

Value

This book provides an essential idea to my argument. It shows that student debt stress is not each individual's problem but rather a societal problem that must be addressed.

My main argument, which is backed by most of my sources, is that the privatization of higher education, through the increase in the need for student loans, is creating a system that reproduces class inequality by negatively affecting lower class students mentally, physically, and financially. Most of my conclusion is based on the fact that students or students' families that have less money need more student loans in order to attend college. This increase in the need for student loans creates stress, which is then placed on the individual, rather than the system that reproduces this stress. This idea of stress privatization comes largely from Dana Becker's book, "One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea." This is a common underlying idea that persists throughout the paper. Most of my sources show that there are relationships between stress (specifically financial stress) and negative physical, mental, and financial affects on students and post students, that largely only affect students with student loans.

My chief counter-argument comes from Cook, Barkham, Audin, Bradley, and Davey's study, Student Debt and Its Relation to Student Mental Health. This study, while providing evidence to support financially stressed students having lower grades, also showed that there is no relationship between anticipated debt and mental health. This is basically saying that the debt students will have over the course of their college experience does not affect their mental health. This part of the study goes against what I am trying to prove, but is ultimately defeated by the fact that higher class students, whom often have no student debt, have no student debt to worry about. There is only student debt stress when student debt is present.

Monday, April 4, 2016

A study done by Doris Bennett, Cynthia McCarty, and Shawn Carter of Jacksonville University titled, The Impact of Financial Stress on Academic Performance in College Economics Courses will be my main example in order to prove my thesis. The title of the article explains all you really need to know about the actual study for this blog's purposes. The summary of this study written at the end details many of the key ideas I wish to touch upon in my paper.

"This research establishes a statistically significant link between financial stress and academic performance. Students who were worried about paying for college averaged 4.5 percentage points lower in class grades than students who were not worried about paying for college. There was a 3.7 point difference in the course grade for students who weren’t able to afford to purchase the required textbooks. Students who stated that the financial stress affected their academic performance had course averages that were 6.6 points lower than those who were not financially stressed. It appears that certain groups of students were more affected by stress than others. A significantly higher proportion of the stressed students with lower scores were women, minorities, and first-generation college students, groups with below average rates of college attendance. Working more hours to meet financial obligations, they have less time to study, which has a negative impact on their academic performance. With lower grades, these financially stressed, often lower income, students are less likely to complete the college education that they need to improve their chances for a better future. The scope of the problem is even broader because students must repay large amounts of student debt, which can potentially have a negative impact on economic growth by hampering their ability to purchase big-ticket items." (Bennet et al.)

This study exemplifies the affects of the privatization of higher education, as well as the student loans it causes, on students- lower class students especially.

"Working more hours to meet financial obligations, they have less time to study, which has a negative impact on their academic performance. With lower grades, these financially stressed, often lower income, students are less likely to complete the college education that they need to improve their chances for a better future." (Bennet et al.)

This idea that the writers put forward is an almost exact outline of what I want to prove in my paper. This case is going to be extremely useful, not only as a study to prove what I am arguing, but as a logically flowing argument that I can incorporate into the rest of my paper.

I am not sure what theory, paradigm, or academic concept help me make sense of my paper. What I do have is information from many sources that supports my thesis. My bibliography consists of studies and research done that links stress, student loans, psychological functioning, physical health, and financial worries. These serve to prove my thesis that the privatization of higher education is essentially further separating the upper class from the middle and lower class, through bot financial methods, as well as psychological ones. The frame of my paper intends to go through the sources and explain how each respective study (with some working together) attributes to the degradation of the lower classes and promotion of the higher class. Essentially, the privatization of higher education is separating the classes through the increasing need for student loans.

This graph was taken from the Walsemann, Gee, and Gentile article titled, Sick of Our Loans: Student borrowing and the mental health of young adults in the United States. This graph was created by them using data collected by their study in order to show the relationship between predicted psychological functioning and amount of student loans, while also keeping in mind the parental net worth. While writing the first rough draft of my paper, I focused on how the privatization of higher education was generally affecting students, but through further reading and analysis of my sources, along with discussing my paper with Professor Geoller, I saw a different general thesis for my paper. The financial class of a student was something discussed in almost all of my sources, but I failed to include this heavily in my paper. This graph, along with a lot of other information I have found, is steering the direction of my paper more towards how the privatization of higher education is increasing the stress of lower class students and the implications that come along with that, along with the fact that lower class students are financially worse off because of it. This graph is a key example of what I am talking about.

This paper basically analyses the relationship between attitudes toward debt and the mental health of university graduates in the UK. The study showed that students became more concerned about their finances as they moved on through university and that their attitudes toward debt were related to their mental health levels. The study also found that students who had high financial concerns possessed significantly lower grades than students with low financial concerns. Students with high financial concerns felt more "tense, anxious, or nervous," more "criticized by other people," and found it more "difficult getting to sleep or staying asleep" than students with low financial concerns. They also found evidence to suggest that students with high worry about their debt anticipated leaving school with higher debt that low debt worry students. However, the study found no relation between anticipated debt and mental health. Basically what that means is, economic and demographic factors do not appear to predict mental health, but rather, a student's level of concern over finances shows the relationship.

Authors

Richard Cooke, Michael Barkham, Kerry Audin, and Margaret Bradley- work in the Psychological Therapies Research Center in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds

John Davy- works at the School of Computing at the University of Leeds

Key Terms

high financial concerns- shown to have a relationship with lower grades and more mental health problems

low financial concern- shown to have a relationship with better grades and less mental health issues

Quotes

"The increase in the cost of university appears to have impacted on students' debt tolerance. Work by Lea et al. (2001) indicates that students become more debt-tolerant as they progress through higher education. In contrast, the current data show that students become more concerned with finances as they progress through university... [the main] reason for the difference is the situation students in the present study, with most students having to take loans to pay for higher education, and these loans being much larger than in 1995. "(Cooke et al. pg 62-3)

"Examining the pattern of results for the comparisons between the high, low, and no debt worry groups suggests that the high worry group are not necessarily more worried about things in general." (Cooke et al. pg 64)

"The one difference between students with low and no debt worry was that students with low debt worry had less feeling that they had achieved things they wanted to compared to students with no debt worry. This interesting finding suggests that although the low debt worry students are not suffering worsened mental health due to their debt, they may be prevented from doing desired activities by their debt." (Cooke et al. pg 64)

Value

This is one of the most useful articles I have found. It is an in depth study on the actual factors that are related to my paper rather than just student debt and mental health. This article, along with the article mentioned by Lea et. al for comparison, will be crucial in delving deeper into the actual effects of student debt on mental health.